Alison Frankel

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In a post earlier this week, I wrote about whistleblower lawyers’ concerns that unsuspecting tipsters will be misled into signing up with one of the many non-lawyer groups advertising on the Internet for Dodd-Frank whistleblowers. Unlike lawyers’ websites, ads by non-lawyers aren’t subject to state bar regulations. Nor are fee agreements between whistleblowers and non-lawyer agents. Lawyers who regularly represent tipsters told me that a proliferation of supposedly deceptive ads after the Securities and Exchange Commission implemented its whistleblower bounty program is one of the biggest problems in their business.

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If Khaled Asadi, a former GE Energy executive who lost his job after alerting his boss to concerns that GE might have run afoul of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, had sued his old employer in New York or Connecticut, things might have worked out differently for him. Several federal trial judges in those jurisdictions have ruled that whistle-blowers who report corporate wrongdoing internally are protected by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, even though the statute defines whistle-blowers as employees who report securities violations to the Securities and Exchange Commission. But Asadi, who worked in GE Energy’s office in Amman, Jordan, filed a claim that the company had illegally retaliated against him in federal district court in Houston. And on Wednesday, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals – with hardly a nod to contrary lower-court decisions in other circuits – ruled that Asadi is not a whistle-blower under Dodd-Frank because he talked to his boss and not the SEC.

Author Profile

Alison Frankel updates On the Case multiple times throughout the day on WestlawNext Practitioner Insights. A founding editor of the Litigation Daily, she has covered big-ticket litigation for more than 20 years. Frankel’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, The American Lawyer and several other national publications. She is also the author of Double Eagle: The Epic Story of the World’s Most Valuable Coin.